Starfleet Tours offers rare glimpses into the gentle lives of "sea cows."

All photos ©2007 Starfleet Tours, Special to WhozHereNow.com

Starfleet Scuba offers a very unusual tour: manatee watching on mangrove-flanked rivers inside a national park. Tourists are led up an old banana-boat canal to the mouth of the Rios Changuinola and San San, where they can snorkel or wildelife watch from a spacious platform located on the edge of a mangrove.

The park is home to many manatees, large aquatic mammals sometimes called "sea cows" due to their size, slow movements and gentle disposition. The curious, harmless and endangered creatures will sometimes swim up to people to give them a look-see.

Seeing a sea cow up close in their natural setting can be a magical experience. The Manatee Tour includes a light breakfast, national park entry fee, a barbeque lunch, kayak use, nature walk and riverboat tour.

This from Wikipedia (paraphrased): Manatees (family Trichechidae, genus Trichechus) are large, fully-aquatic marine mammals. The name comes from the Spanish manatí, which itself comes from a Carib word meaning "breast." They comprise three of the four living species in the order Sirenia, the other being the dugong. The Sirenia is thought to have evolved from four legged land mammals over 60 million years ago, with the closest living relatives being the Proboscidea (elephants) and Hyracoidea (hyraxes).

The Trichechidae differ from the dugong in the shape of the skull and the shape of the tail. Dugongs have a forked tail, similar in shape to a whale's, while manatees' tails are paddle-shaped. They are mainly herbivores, spending most of their time grazing in shallow waters and at depths of 1-2 meters (3-7 feet).

Much of the knowledge about manatees is based upon research done in Florida and cannot necessarily be attributed to all types of manatees. Generally, manatees have a mean mass of 410-545 kilograms (900-1200 pounds), and mean length of 2.7-3 meters (9-10 feet), with maximums of 3.6 meters and 1775 kilograms seen (the females tend to be larger and heavier). When born, baby manatees have an average mass of 30 kilograms.

On average, manatees swim about 3 to 5 miles per hour. However, they have been known to swim up to 20 miles per hour in short bursts. Manatees inhabit the shallow, marshy coastal areas and rivers of the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico (T. manatus, West Indian manatee), the Amazon basin (T. inunguis, Amazonian manatee), and West Africa (T. senegalensis, African manatee).

Florida is usually the northernmost range of the West Indian manatee as their low metabolic rate makes cold weather endurance difficult. They may on occasion stray up the mid-Atlantic coast in summer. Half a manatee's day is spent sleeping in the water, surfacing for air regularly at intervals no greater than 20 minutes.

Location

Calle 1 at Avenida D

Bocas Town

Isla Colón, Bocas del Toro

Panama